Florence Pugh heads the cast in The Wonder, a Netflix movie set in Ireland in 1862 which is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel. The Marvel and Fighting With My Family star will play Lib Wright, an English nurse who trained under Florence Nightingale. She is summoned to Ireland to observe a deeply religious girl, 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who is said to have survived without eating any food for months. The girl has been heralded as a miracle and has become a tourist attraction. But is something more sinister afoot?
So here’s everything you need to know about the Netflix psychological period drama The Wonder including a chat with Florence Pugh.
The Wonder release date
The Wonder launches worldwide on Netflix from Friday November 16 2022. The movie previously had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday, September 13 2022.
Is there a trailer for The Wonder?
Yes a trailer for The Wonder has been released by Netflix, which opens with a serious looking Florence Pugh as Lib Wright travelling by train, the horse coach. "You are here only to watch..." she is told. Take a look below...
The Wonder plot
The Wonder is set in Ireland in 1862. There, a sceptical English nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) is summoned to a tiny village to witness and validate what some are calling a miracle. A deeply religious 11-year-old girl, Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) is said to have survived for months without food, living only on ‘manna from heaven’. Tourists have flocked to Anna’s cabin and a journalist is reporting the story but is all as it seems?
As Lib and a nun take turns to observe the girl to discover whether she is actually eating, and if not how she is able to survive without food, she becomes desperate to get to the truth. But soon she and Anna grow close and it’s left to Lib to get to the bottom of this miracle or stop the destruction of Anna’s life.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph sends over a journalist, Will Byrne (Strike star Tom Burke), to report on ‘the miracle girl’.
The Wonder cast — Florence Pugh as Lib Wright
Florence Pugh, 26, is playing English nurse Lib. She says: "For me, it’s a conversation and a conflict about science versus religion. That’s also something that we’re dealing with now. It’s a tale literally as old as time."
Although Lib fears that those who engaged her don’t really care about Anna’s welfare, she feels that she can’t speak out.
"Lib is a strong, stubborn woman who knows that she is right in certain aspects, but is unable to tell her truth,’ says Pugh. "So to me, it was more about biting my own tongue. All the films that I know, that I love doing, are about me getting in there and going in guns blazing, but I couldn’t in this one because ultimately, at that time, it wouldn't happen."
Florence Pugh starred in ITV dram Marcella in 2016 and appeared in the acclaimed film Lady Macbeth that same year. In 2018, she starred in BBC1's spy thriller The Little Drummer Girl. Her big movie break came playing Saraya Knight (aka Paige) in the 2019 wrestling film Fighting With My Family. She’s since played Amy in Little Women and starred in films Black Widow and Midsommar. In 2022, she will also appear in the movie Don’t Worry Darling with Harry Styles and Olivia Wilde.
Who else is starring in The Wonder?
The Wonder will also feature Tom Burke (Strike, Mank) as William Byrne, while Belfast and This Is Going To Hurt actor Josie Walker plays Sister Michael and Kíla Lord Cassidy plays 11-year-old Anna. No Offence star Elaine Cassidy as Anna’s mother Rosaleen (who happens to be the child actor’s real-life mother. Detectorists and Danny Boy star Toby Jones, Raised by Wolves and The Virtues actress Niamh Algar, plus Ciarán Hinds (Game of Thrones) also appear. Dermot Crowley, Brían F O'Byrne and David Wilmot round out the supporting cast.
The real-life inspiration behind The Wonder
Author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder was inspired by a real-life phenomenon known as ‘the fasting girls’. These were girls, reported across Europe, who claimed they didn’t need food to survive. One such ‘fasting girl’ was 19th century Welsh 12-year-old Sarah Jacob who didn’t eat for more than two years. She eventually died of starvation and her parents were convicted of manslaughter.
“I came across the Fasting Girl phenomenon back in the mid-1990s. I was instantly intrigued by these cases, which seemed to echo medieval saints starving as an act of penance, and also modern anorexics, but weren’t exactly the same as either,” says Emma Donoghue.
“It seemed to say a lot about what it’s meant to be a girl – in many Western countries, from the sixteenth century right through to the twentieth – that these girls became celebrities by not eating. But I never found one real case that rang that little bell in me, telling me this was the story I had to tell in a novel. Finally, it occurred to me that if I was still so fascinated by the Fasting Girls, two decades on, I should drop my usual method of writing a historical novel based on a real case, and let myself invent a story.”
All about The Wonder author Emma Donoghue
Dublin-born writer Emma Donoghue’s debut novel Room sold over two million copies and in 2015 it was adapted into a film starring Brie Larson, who won an Oscar for best actress for the role. She played a woman held in captivity for seven years, who has a child whilst a prisoner. Emma has also written Akin, The Pull of the Stars, and a number of historical novels including Frog Music and The Sealed Letter.
The Wonder is based on her 2016 novel of the same name. "The Wonder is a very strange story but it is, in fact, inspired by fact," explains the author. "There were about 50 or 60 cases of so-called “fasting girls” who hit the papers from the 16th century through to the 20th century. In countries ranging from Europe through Britain and Ireland to America and Canada you’d get a girl or a young woman who was said to live on no food."
One particular case led to Donoghue’s book. "There was a fasting girl where nurses were hired by The Times newspaper to watch a girl in Wales,’ she says. ‘And I thought that was a weird kind of unholy alliance of the medical establishment and the media establishment."
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